A member of the faculty since 1993, Professor of Sociology Ronald Ortiz Flores is also the director of the University's Community Based Learning Program, which offers students a variety of academic opportunities to combine community engagement and service with course-based activities and assignments in ways that are designed to promote student learning and personal development. He teaches all levels of undergraduate students, including a recent First-Year Seminar on baseball, his passion outside of academia. Flores has also taught courses on race and ethnic relations, family, urban society, rural sociology and quantitative demography, and has written two books: The Newest New Yorkers, about immigration in New York City, and Puerto Rican New York. Flores says that the strength of St. Lawrence from a professor's perspective is the institution's commitment to teaching. "I sense a dedication to student growth here," he says. "A liberal arts education is such that students take flight personally and grow intellectually. Education is my way of making a difference, and it is very satisfying." Flores earned the Ph.D. in sociology from Brown University, after completing his undergraduate studies at Fordham University.